Writings, museums provide lessons on racism

By Phyllis ErneySpecial to the Guardian

Wednesday

Sep 25, 2019 at 11:18 AM

The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a collection of essays and poems reflecting America’s dark 400-year history of African slavery, documents the horrific impact of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, segregation, redlining and land robbery well into the 20th century. None of this was taught by my U.S. history teachers as I grew up in my rural, all-white community in the Midwest in the 1950s. Issues of race or racism were not on my radar.

Moving to Florida in the 1960s ended my naivete. Both my husband and I were intimately involved in the difficulties of integration in the 1960s and 1970s. In college, my husband’s African-American college teammate was unable to rent an apartment for his family. Then we experienced the violent resistance to integration of our first neighborhood in Jacksonville followed by the difficulties of integrating public schools in both Jacksonville and Gainesville in the 1970s.

Now as a retired public school educator, I’ve spent the past three years immersed in educating myself about issues of racism and social justice. Motivated in part by having a biracial granddaughter, and wanting to relate to her learning to live in two different cultures, I had long ago began reading Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin.

More recently I discovered Ibram Kendi’s book “Stamped from the Beginning,” an exhaustive definitive history of slavery and its aftermath in America. Michael Dyson’s “Tears We Cannot Stop — A Sermon to White America” challenged me to embrace author/journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ plea: “250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal, 35 years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

I then asked myself, “How did I get this old without learning more about our country’s racist ideas and practices?”

I moved on to legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow — Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” I read “African American and Latinx History of the United States” by University of Florida professor Paul Ortiz. I was amazed to learn of our history through the lens of African-American and Latinx civil rights activists.

In reading Michelle Obama’s recent memoir “Becoming,” I learned about her growing up on the south side of Chicago and the impact of real estate redlining and the racial barriers her father faced as he tried to get a good paying job to support his family. My father did not have to face those challenges for our family.

This past year I attended the Matheson Museum seminars on the Newberry Six Lynchings (August 1916) and the Rosewood Massacres (January 1923). My husband and I recently took our two young adult granddaughters to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit both the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (informally known as National Lynching Memorial) and The Legacy Museum that is built on the site of a slave warehouse.

Both memorials are the result of the work of the Equal Justice Initiative directed by Bryan Stevenson, dedicated to providing legal representation to poor prisoners without effective representation. He notes, “We must have truth before reconciliation.” What an important historical field trip this would be for all students and citizens.

Now I have come full circle, back to my Midwest roots, as I just finished reading “Dying of Whiteness – How Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland” by Jonathan Metzl, which sadly helps explain a lot of what’s happening in America today. The stain of slavery has been woven throughout the fabric of our country, but our school U.S. history textbooks devote very few pages to its devastating impact. So I am not surprised that much of our country seems at best uninformed and, at worst, ignorant of slavery’s legacy.

I am encouraged by a couple of developments locally. Gainesville for All and the Empowerment Zone are working to make a difference in the lives of children and families in east Gainesville with collaboration from people all over our town.

The diligent work of the Alachua County African American History Task Force, in collaboration with Jon Rehm, curriculum specialist for Alachua County Public Schools, has resulted in African and African American History being taught as separate courses at all of our high schools this school year. He is also sharing the timely 1619 Project and its free curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center with our schools as well.

Seeds of hope. It is beyond time for us to truly make amends for America’s original sin.

Phyllis Erney lives in Gainesville.

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